In the 11th article in a series on 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius discusses the life, career and times of Willie Apap.

Willie Apap (1918-1970) occupies a prominent place in the development of Maltese 20th-century art although his decision to set up his studio in Rome after World War II meant that he was away from the island for long periods.

The Descent from the Cross

Unlike Giorgio Preca, who moved to Rome at approximately the same time, Apap was not actively involved in any of the artist groups of the 1950s. These two factors sometimes mitigate the value of his contribution to the development of Maltese modernism. However, his frequent trips to Malta nurtured meaningful friendships with his artist colleagues and cross-fertilisation of concepts.

Apap studied at the Malta School of Art under the watchful eye of the Caruana Dingli brothers. His older brother, Vincent Apap (1909-2003), one of Malta’s foremost 20th-century sculptors, used to keep his more exuberant brother in check. He influenced his young sibling to embrace a more classical-based aesthetic. Willie Apap, together with Esprit Barthet, Victor Diacono, Anton Inglott, Carmelo Borg Pisani and Emvin Cremona, continued his studies in Rome under Carlo Siviero. Rome became his home away from home.

His love for the eternal city landed him in troubled waters with the British authorities in Malta. Before the start of hostilities between Italy and Great Britain, Maltese nationals, as British subjects, were advised to leave Italy. Failing to do so constituted an act of treason that could lead to tragic consequences.

Fellow student Carmelo Borg Pisani (1915-1942) was a sympathiser of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and staunchly anti-British. On November 12, 1942, he was executed in Malta after his capture on Maltese soil while on an unsuccessful and tragic mission as a spy for the Italian regime. 

Apap harboured no such leanings but lingered in Rome and lost his last chance to be repatriated. After the war, a contingent of Maltese ‘traitors’ was arrested in Rome and deported to Malta, imprisoned, officially charged with treason and faced trial by jury.

The trial confirmed Apap’s innocence − the artist was in the wrong place at the wrong time. During the imprisonment and trial, he indulged in his ability as a caricaturist by sketching his fellow inmates in prison, the jurors, the lawyers and the judge at court.

The Temptation of St Anthony the Hermit

The shocking untimely death of his friend Anton Inglott (1915-1945) robbed Apap of the company of a like-minded spirit. Inglott’s sacred art introduced a mellowness and a stillness to the genre in Malta, as best exemplified by The Death of St Joseph at the Msida parish church and, more sublimely, by The Raising of Lazarus. Some of this rubbed off on the other artist whose early sacred work, elongations of the necks of the saints included, is indebted to El Greco (1541-1614).

Apap’s repertoire of portraits of members of the Maltese high society, the clergy, important Maltese businessmen and personalities show his capability for portraiture. It was no mean feat to have to walk in the footsteps of his former tutor Edward Caruana Dingli and succeeding him as Malta’s premier portrait painter. Together with his brother Vincent, he was commissioned for portraits of members of the British royal family which showed that he harboured no Fascist leanings and no hard feelings for his unnecessary incarceration.

He bestowed a Mary Cassat radiance on his portraits of young children, especially those of his two nieces and nephew, his brother Vincent’s children. He never got married and didn’t have children of his own. Apap’s portraits demonstrate his supreme abilities at reproducing facial likenesses, thus determining the sitters’ identities without any shadow of doubt. 

His love for the eternal city landed him in troubled waters with the British authorities in Malta

It is, however, his paintings of ballerinas, clowns and nudes that establish his renown as a superlative painter of the human figure. These lowly protagonists are generally crestfallen, narrating stories of lives less ordinary. The lack of facial features augments the sorrowful and naked solitude. Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, surmises: “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

Female Undressing by the Window

The ballerina theme immediately induces analogies with the work of Edgar Degas. Dance as an artform was not so intriguing for the French artist who was more interested in documenting the tribulations and life stories of the dancers’s bodies punished by their choice of artistic expression. Like Degas, Apap refrains from the romantic portrayal of the graceful performing dancer by shearing off any notions of empirical stereotype. For both artists, it is secondary that these much-abused bodies belong to a category that still labels them as dancers even outside the performing stage.

At the start of the 20th-century, the Camden Town Nudes of British artist Walter Sickert caused much controversy as they challenged the accepted norms of British society; this also amid the backdrop offered by the spate of murders that shook this enclave of north London. These destitute women, wallowing in the discomfort of their drab and murky homes, bedsteads and crumpled bedsheets included, were unceremoniously portrayed by Sickert as lost and vulnerable souls; ones without any hope of redemption and at the mercy of the serial murderer Jack the Ripper.

Apap portrays the ballerinas and nudes in their rooms or at his studio.  The crumpled sheets, the newspapers, the plants in their pots and the bouquets of flowers add context and dignity. These women, unlike their London counterparts, live a daily life with a hint of normality.

Pierre Bonnard portrayed his wife, Marthe, who is unselfconscious while attending to her daily ablutions. There is a non-staged component to these works as this is a wife in her environment and isn’t expected to strike a pose. Everyday domestic life is the underlying context in the case of Bonnard. Whereas Apap’s context, like Fausto Pirandello’s, is a little less ‘honest’ due to the staged components in some of the compositions.

The Musing Ballerina

The Maltese artist’s paintings display a disarming sense of a hope not yet lost. Sickert’s stark nudes are stenched with incumbent death.

The trademark shafts of light is a common feature in Apap’s 1960s paintings across all genres. This alternation of light and dark behaves like notes on a piano keyboard, imparting tone and rhythm to the composition.

Lyonel Feininger, renowned for his semi-abstract landscapes and cityscapes, introduced shafts of light into his work as a suggestion of heavenly omnipresence. This technique worked exceptionally well for Apap, especially in his sacred art, nudes and ballerinas. His visit to Brazil in 1963 produced some Gauguin-inspired pen and ink studies of lush foliage and native women. The works from this period are collectively known as his Brazil Period.

The sacred art of the last decade of Apap’s life portends a life that was creeping towards its end. In Christ and the Adulteress, Christ in the Wilderness and The Descent from the Cross, Apap swathes Christ in a shaft of incandescent light. In the second case, the darkness that surrounds Christ teems with a legion of Bosch/Grünenwald-like monsters. The Descent from the Cross focuses on the lifeless and tortured body as the Mater Dolorosa, uncomforted and all alone, is overcome by self-pity and dejection. The shafts of light are employed by Apap to highlight the divine. 

Oscar Wilde declared that: “What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body but is the body of the soul.”

These shafts of light and shadow in Apap’s 1960s oeuvre, at a time when he was already in his 40s, could be read as a metaphysical reaching out, a belief that life observed through the mesh of experience is diffracted into dualities such as light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. It is light that actually creates shadows. Lack of light does not mean utter darkness; truth and hope are at times concealed in the penumbral grey.

A long illness claimed Apap’s life on February 3, 1970. He died in Rome, his home away from home, lovingly comforted by his devoted brother, Vincent.